Letters to the editor for Thursday, September 27, 2012

Thursday

Sep 27, 2012 at 2:00 AM

Has anyone noticed that employees of the Port Authority and the MTA never go on strike? Perhaps because their salaries, benefits and overtime, that cause inflated retirement pensions, are shamefully excessive.

Has anyone noticed that employees of the Port Authority and the MTA never go on strike? Perhaps because their salaries, benefits and overtime, that cause inflated retirement pensions, are shamefully excessive.

If these expenses could be reined in, our existing fares could support the existing system.

Seymour Borden

Middletown

The falsehoods from congressional candidate Sean Maloney on Medicare are monumental. Please let no one forget that Maloney supports Obamacare. This program will divert $716 billion from Medicare to fund this new entitlement program that is a regulatory and fiscal nightmare. The diversion of $716 billion in Medicare funds will have a devastating effect on the quality of care provided to seniors.

The cut in funding is achieved by lowering the reimbursement rates to doctors and hospitals for the Medicare services they provide. The reimbursement rates will end up being lower than Medicaid. Ask a person on Medicaid how difficult it is to find a doctor who accepts those rates. Importantly, the loss in revenue to doctors and hospitals will be made up when doctors end up charging more for services to their patients who have insurance.

What Maloney wants everyone to ignore is that this rise in health-care costs (when premiums are raised) is a hidden tax on middle-class residents. This is on top of the $3.8 billion in new taxes that the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation said would affect the middle class when Obamacare is fully implemented.

Paul Karp

Campbell Hall

Environment New York released a report, "The Costs of Fracking," which exposed the hidden economic downside to fracking. The environmental damage done by this destructive drilling in other states — contaminating water, making families sick, and ruining our forests — is bad enough by itself. But to add insult to injury, our research shows that, when the boom is over, we'll get stuck with the bill. I was particularly struck by the fact that the truck traffic needed to deliver water to a single fracking well causes as much damage to local roads as nearly 3.5 million car trips. In Pennsylvania, this translated to the state estimating that they needed to spend $265 million in 2010 to fix the damage.

Like every other polluting boom, the new gas rush looks seductively like a "get rich quick" scheme. But history tells a different story. Decades after Pennsylvania's coal mining boom, that state is now stuck with $5 billion in cleanup costs, and those old mining companies are long gone. The staggering health and environmental tolls of fracking are reason enough to ban the practice. But it also turns out that dirty drilling means dollars down the drain.